Being There

Wars, like other matters, have a heart to them, but the nature of the heart is existential, personal to each participant, as variable as souls, as intimate as smells. For me, the heart of the Hundred-Hour War was a deep and sometimes bewildering intimacy, full of exhilaration and fear and chaos and wretchedness, like falling in love with a crazy lady. It was an unexpected thing to find. This was supposed to be, as far as journalists were concerned, a distant war. The Pentagon's notion had been to keep almost all reporters at an antiseptic distance from the fighting, and for most of the air war and the buildup to the ground war that is what happened. But when the fighting actually began, a small part of the large and purposely cumbersome media-management machine collapsed of its own weight and extra parts, leaving a cloud of confusion and opportunity. Those who slipped through it found themselves blessed by circumstance. The ground war was really just one big battle, spread over a few hundred square miles and four days. A man in a four-wheel drive could drop in and out of this or that battlefield, could wander through the liberation of a town or the surrender of a platoon or the shelling of an army. When the shooting stopped, exactly one hundred hours after it had begun, he could tour through the liberation of Kuwait City and dip in and out of southern Iraq to sniff the air for cordite and rebellion. It was all as open as a circus, or, more precisely, a freak show.

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One sweet and sunny afternoon, about a week after the cease-fire, I went for a drive along the road from Kuwait City to the Iraqi port town of Basra. I drove past the roasted wrecks of tanks and trucks, past the rotting, bloated bodies under the blankets and the bluebottle flies, past the first and the second Allied checkpoints. In recent days, Iraqi troops had taken prisoner a couple dozen Western journalists in the southern part of the country, so I had meant to be careful to stop at the second checkpoint, but I was daydreaming, and I drove through it without even noticing. When after twenty miles or so I came to another checkpoint, I wasn't surprised to see that the soldiers were Arabs; most of the checkpoints were manned by Saudi, Kuwaiti or Egyptian troops, part of the American delicacy in keeping a low profile. In the days after the war's end, pink faces tend to get waved right through checkpoints, and mine is aggressively pink; I slowed just a bit, beamed and waved. But the soldiers, seven or eight of them, waved their hands and pointed their rifles at the windshield in a no-fooling-around sort of way, and I stopped.

One, clearly an officer, spoke English. "Get out of the car," he said, and I did. "Where are you going?" he said. No place in particular, I said. "What are you doing here?" he said. Nothing much, I said, just looking around. To my mild surprise, the other soldiers began searching the car. They made a pile of items they found suspicious: maps, batteries, notebooks, a Kuwaiti flag. "Excuse me," I said. "I am an American reporter. Here"—pointing to the laminated photo tags around my neck—"are my Kuwaiti and Saudi credentials. Okay? I can go now?" No response. I thought to try a little conversation. "So, what are you guys?" I asked. "Egyptian army?"

The officer gave me a look. "No," he said. "Iraqi."

"No, really," I said. "No kidding. What are you guys really?"

"Really," he said, slowly, as to a dim child. "We are really Iraqi Army. This is Iraq." I looked at him and noticed that his brass belt buckle bore the Germanic eagle that is the symbol of Iraq, then looked around at his colleagues, who were busily carting off my food and water, maps and shortwave radio, and knew he was telling the truth and I was a fool. In the next five minutes, I talked a lot. I said I had not meant to come this far into Iraq and would certainly be happy to leave. I said I wouldn't be making this mistake again. After a bit, they told me to go. "I will," I said. "But first I want my radio back." It was a good radio, a Sony five-band, and it had cost me $137, and for some reason this seemed like a big deal at the moment. A former girlfriend used to accuse me of having an unusually great capacity for denying the reality of a situation, and it seems to me now that she was right on the money. "There is no radio," said the soldier holding the radio, himself denying the reality of the situation.

"There is a radio," I said.

"There is no radio," he said. "Go, if you want to go."

As I drove away, the soldiers took time off from loading my food into their car to wave amiable good-byes. My fiancée, who is not the same person who accused me of a loose grasp on reality, says the only reason they let me go is that they figured no one could pretend to be that stupid. This seems to me right on the money too.

I had driven about halfway back to the border when three men jumped out from some sand dunes by the side of the road and hailed the car to stop. They were Iraqi soldiers also, although just barely. Their uniforms were filthy and torn, and only one of the three wore shoes. They crowded around the car and made "Feed me" motions with their hands to their mouths. "Hello, mister," they said. "Food, mister. Food." One of them, a platoon commander in his thirties named Khalid, spoke a little English; I told him I had no food to give him because his colleagues up the road had just taken it all. He said he was sorry about that and that I must have a bite with him. I followed him up a dirt path through some sand berms and a modest-sized trench. Khalid was very dirty, and his black-encrusted toes stuck out from the holes in his plastic shoes, from which he had cut off the backs. He was gaunt in the face, his cheeks and eye sockets settled into blue shadow, but he was not starving yet. Next to some huts were parked two supply trucks filled with dark-green crates of .50-caliber machine-gun rounds and shiny metal canisters. "To make fire on people," Khalid said, pointing to the canisters. "We never use."

He was, astonishingly enough, house-proud of his bunker, a beat and battered old adobe hut that must have belonged to a poor farmer. He shared it with the other two soldiers, their thin gray pallets crowded together on the concrete floor. The room smelled earthy and damp and of animals, like a cellar in an old house where an old dog sleeps. On the walls by the beds were a few color photographs, torn from Arab magazines, of heavily made-up young ladies. Just face shots, no skin; Arab pinups are as chaste as, and look rather like, old-fashioned high-school-graduation pictures. A few cheap aluminum pots and pans containing rice and dirty water stood in the corner, with a shallow tin bowl of tomatoes. Khalid gestured around. "Beautiful, beautiful," he said.

We sat and drank a little water. He offered me a tomato, but I declined. He said he was tired of the war and that Saddam was no good. All the senior officers had gone days before, he said. He did not know what to do. He was aware that the shooting had stopped but did not know why. He said he could not surrender unless his superior officers came back and told him to. "If the Americans come, I fight," he said. I don't this he had any idea that an entire American army was sitting around in the sand a few miles from him and would have sent a couple dozen soldiers and a few tanks and maybe an armored personnel carrier or two over to kill him, except that he wasn't worth interrupting the volleyball games in the sand. He didn't seem really interested in fighting anyway. "Americans good people. George Bush good people," he said. "Very good." He walked me past the trucks and the trench back to my car. AS I was leaving, he asked me for cigarettes. I said the other soldiers had taken them too, which brought forth a wistful outcry. "I want cigarettes," he said. "I want beer. I want arrack. I want to go to a Sheraton in Baghdad. I want to go to Meridien. I want to go to America."

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Without trying too hard, I saw fifty-seven corpses during and after this short war. Forty-nine of them belonged to Iraqi soldiers, eight to Kuwaitis tortured and killed by Iraqi soldiers. None belonged to American troops. Twenty-seven were blown apart and then incinerated by explosives; ten were merely exploded; three died in car crashes trying to escape bombs; thirteen were shot; one was beaten to death; two were roasted alive; and one was shot but probably would have died anyway, from having his eyes gouged out. I saw only one clean and neat dead man. He was an Iraqi lieutenant who had caught a bullet in the chest on the first full day of war, and who, when I saw him, was being hoisted up and jammed into the back of a cattle truck packed with nearly 600 of his luckier colleagues. There wasn't much enthusiasm for his company, but an Egyptian officer fired four or five shots in the air not too far over the heads of those in the truck, and thus encouraged them to make way for the dead. He lay on the boards in the very last bit of space available, bare feet all around his face, his mouth open and the rain falling in. If not for the red patch on the left side of his chest that was spreading to his armpit and his back, you would have thought he was sleeping off a deep, deep drunk.

I guess it isn't quite right to say I loved seeing all this. What I loved was the fact that I could see it. Most of life, most of the time, is seen through a series of filters, some of which we put up ourselves and some of which are put up by others. For about ten days in Kuwait, everything was naked, and those who make it their business and pleasure to peer and poke into the lives and deaths of others found a strange and rich and awful feast.

One day, I stopped by the side of the highway going from Kuwait City to Basra, at the scene of a slaughter by U.s Forces of the retreating, loot-laden Iraqi occupiers. Now, five days after the killing, the road was still heavily littered with dead machines and men. The corpses were mangled and burned and swollen by the gases of decay. A group of middle-aged and prosperous Kuwaiti men were touring them, stopping at each body to pull down the blanket and look at the face of the vanquished enemy. In one Toyota, the driver's body lay in parts, shot literally to pieces. The brain, a black puddingly mass, lay by itself on the hump between the driver's and the passenger's seats, under a halo of flies. Most of the body was, however, under a filthy green army blanket. One of the men pulled down the covering, while another recorded the scene with his video camera. The others crowded cautiously around to look. They seemed unsure of what to do. After a long stare, one leaned down closer to the corpse and—in a prissy, pursed-lip sort of way—spat in its face. As the men turned to go, one noticed a couple of fingers, black and frayed at the ends but still joined to the hand by a bit of membrane, that had strayed out from under the blanket and lay beckoning in the dirt. He lifted up a corner of wool and, in a motion curiously neat and delicate, kicked the fingers with the toe of his Nike. They skidded along, stirring up a tiny plume of dust into the dark stink under the shroud.

My astonishment at seeing things like this was all the more so for the contrast with what was supposed to be. The place where most reporters were supposed to sit through the ground war what Dhahran, a company town (the company being Aramco, the Arab-American oil giant) in northeastern Saudi Arabia where, by the third week in February, a couple thousand journalists had gathered. The scene in Dhahran was exactly what you would expect in the U.S. military to come up with as a place to corral the media: a hotel with MPs instead of doormen, mini-bars with nonalcoholic malt beverages instead of beer, great swatches of blather instead of news, jargon instead of language.

On my first day there, I sat down with two dozen other fellows in front of a television set and took notes on CNN's broadcast of a Pentagon briefing in Washington. The second day, I signed a piece of paper promised to pay $3,200 for one month's use of a four-wheel-drive Nissan Safari, borrowed a U.S. military camouflage shirt and trousers from a friend and formed a loose and convivial partnership with The Baltimore Sun's Dan Fesperman. We went shopping and bought ten jerricans of gasoline, a case of bottled water, a case of orange drink, four Cadbury chocolate bars, a carton of Marlboros, a hunk of salami, fifteen cans of tuna fish, a bag of pistachios, a bag of cashews, a sack of oranges, a bunch of bananas, a six-pack of Pepsi, two bags of dinner rolls, six cans of sardines and a package of Laughing Cow cheese. On the third day, February 24, we drove to Hafar al Batin, a sullen and beat little garrison city some fifty miles south of the junction of the borders of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Kuwait and the jumping-off place for reporters "going unilateral," the jargon phrase that emerged to describe those working outside the U.S. pool rules.

On the battle's first day, we could not find the war. We spent it lost in the rain in the desert. We got lost four times. Every time we got un-lost for five minutes, we got lost again. The only interesting thing we saw all day was in no way war-related: A pickup truck full of sheep went tearing down the road and hit a bump, and one of the sheep bounced straight up into the air and out of the truck and landed on the road. The Bedouin behind the wheel stopped the truck and ran back and picked the sheep up, stuck it back in and drove off again. In the evening, we went back to Hafar al Batin and ate very old chicken and went to sleep in our rooms at the Al Shamal. Mine had a hole in the floor for a toilet, light-green walls splattered with a pattern of black and red paint that gave the effect of old and well-used flypaper, and a ceiling that suffered from psoriasis, the paint flaking off in little white flecks in a more or less continuous cascade. It was a good place to stay because there was no temptation to loll around in bed and miss the war.

We found it the following morning in the form of the Egyptian Army, or two divisions of it at least, heading more or less north into Kuwait. They had begun their attack on the Saddam Line at dawn, and by 4 P.M., after ten hours or so of pounding the Iraqis with field artillery and rockets, had breached the three-foot-high sand berm, covered up a section of the oil-filled trench that Iraqi trooped had filed to set ablaze, cut through three rolls of concertina wire and cleared roads through two mine fields the Iraqis had thoughtfully marked with fences. The Egyptians and their machines—tanks, armored personnel carriers, half-tracks, jeeps and supply trucks—filled the eye to every desert horizon and filled the ear too, with the occasional shiveringly sexy, sibilant whistle of the ground-to-ground missiles playing against the thuds and the cracks of the 155-mm. howitzers. All the sights, and all the sounds, belonged to the attackers. The Iraqis fought back here and there, but only in spots and never for long. The Egyptians were delighted. We stopped to chat with the commander of an armored personnel carrier. "Happy! Happy! Happy! My heart is happy!" he said, beaming and showing off his silver teeth.

Late in the afternoon, we followed an Egyptian tank column through the Iraqi front lines. IN a drizzling rain, 530 Iraqi soldiers and 22 officers sat in the wet sand by the section of trench they had given up an hour before. The prisoners sat with their hands on their head. Nearby, their sorry belongings lay in a litter: a dozen or so cheap plastic combs, a few letters, a handful of coins. Some of the mean head to urinate; a guard led them a few feet away and they pissed into the trench they had given up only an hour earlier. We sat down to talk with an Iraqi lieutenant in his early thirties, who said he had given up himself and his troops at the first possible opportunity. He was a thoughtful man and understandably sad. He contained himself well for a few minutes of talk, but then began weeping, abruptly and deeply. (In normal life, you hardly ever see men cry openly; in war it is commonplace.) "I have a wife; she is a teacher. I think I will never see here again," he said. I felt awkwardly responsible for making him feel better. "You will see her again. The Egyptians won't kill you." He cried some more, but he seemed better. "Please tell me that. I need to hear that," he said. "Please do not kill us. That is all we ask."

Everyone involved in the war had been, to one degree or another, prepared for a fight. Even we reporters who did not want to get in harm's way, but merely close enough to record the fate of those who did, had halfheartedly geared up for the possibility that someone might actually hurt us. We all had gas masks, and some of us had chemical-protection suits, and a few even had helmets and flak jackets. Fesperman and I had two gas masks and one chemical suit between us (we agreed he would get the jacket and the gloves and I would get the pants and the boots, if it came to that). I had some little paper stickers that had been advertised to change color in the event of a gas attack (red for mustard gas, green for nerve, or maybe the other way around), and I put one on the front windshield, one on the driver's side window and one on the exterior rearview mirror. When, on the first day of war, we were able to get our hands on a couple of slightly beat Iraqi helmets, we were pleased to no end, and not because we wanted souvenirs. It was very comforting to own a metal hat.

It was quite a wrench and something of a letdown to realize no one wanted to hurt us at all. This was clear by the second full day of war. We had spent the morning catching up with the Egyptians, who had advanced twenty miles or so during the night and early morning. We drove along, past the supply columns that now stretched unbroken for forty miles or so. Everyone was going forward at perhaps ten miles an hour, which is lightning-fast for an army. Nobody was shooting at anything. There was nothing to shoot at: The landscape was dotted with bobed and burned Iraqi tanks and field guns and crisscrossed with deserted tranches, but there were no enemy soldiers anywhere. At the head of the column, which had not come to a stop, we found Mustafa Kamad, commander of the 22nd Brigade, Third Division, sitting on the sand with a few fellow officers, scratching around with sticks and muttering. They were lost. It had never occurred to me that armies got lost. Kamad, an easygoing sort of general, invited us into his armored personnel carrier to see his field maps. They were big, well-rendered maps and showed, in a welter of blue bow-shaped lines crossed by red arrows, the swift, sure advance of the Allied forces. Kamad estimated that we were forty-three kilometers inside Kuwait now.

While he was talking, the other senior officers were still busy arguing and drawing lines in the sand. It was difficult; the wind had kicked up pretty strongly and was driving a decent-sized rain along with it, and everyone had to hunch against it and talk loudly. There was a sense of futility to the whole conversation, and when the arguing officers eventually settled on a direction, I suspected it was more in the interest of moving on than in the actual geographic facts of the situation. I think maybe Kamad suspected this too, but he shrugged and ordered the army in the new direction. The invasion started up again, slowly and ponderously, with much creaking and clanking as the tanks maneuvered into their new positions. To amuse himself, and us, Kamad invited to take the lead position in our Nissan, and for several miles we did. It was a fine sensation. Behind us, the tanks and armored personnel carriers, the supply trucks, the jeeps and the field guns stretched in four great lines going back forty miles, spread out toward the edge of what could be seen. Ahead of us, the sand and the scrub extended in a bumpy, dusty forever, with no enemy in sight. I tried to feel as if I were leading a great army in attack, but I really felt like part of the world's largest, most heavily armed drive in the country. We waved and made V-for-victory signs at the tank commanders, and they waved back at us, and we honked our horn. It was a lot of fun, but after five minutes or so, a little boring too, so we peeled off to take in the liberation of Al Abraq.

This was a little desert town five miles or so to the west, where the Iraqis had kept weapons and a large contingent of soldiers. Kamad said it had been attacked by Egyptian forces a few hours before, immediately following heavy bombing and shelling, and that fighting might well still be going on. Of course it wasn't. Surrendering was going on. The town had been bombed, rocketed and shelled into concrete and metal, rubble, and all that was left intact were the Iraqi bunkers, some of them elaborate. Most of the officers had fled; the 400 or so soldiers left to defend the post had given up as soon as the Egyptians arrived, and were still giving up, popping nervously out of holes and tunnels with their hands high above their head, when we got there. We walked around, up and down a couple muddy streets, in the rain, with General Yaheh Alwan, commander of the Third Mechanized Division, the liberators of Al Abraq. The general was in the middle of a sentence and in the middle of a step when five Iraqis burst from an unseen bunker a few feet away and ran straight at him, waving their hands in surrender. He took them in tow with hardly a moment's attention, and they tagged along after him, in a straggling, forlorn little group, as he continued his tour, pointing at objects of interest with his swagger stick and walking with an understandable bit of bounce.

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The events in Al Abraq suggested that things were moving so fast and so decisively that we had better head toward Kuwait City if we wanted to make it for the liberation, or at least the party afterward. The highway to the capital was tougher going that the desert; the retreating Iraqis had blown it up every couple hundred yards and had laid two mine fields across it. We were slogging along in the late afternoon, with no one else around, when we saw, standing across the road, blocking both sides, a ragged line of green. As we got closer, Fesperman said he thought they might be Iraqis. "Do you think they're armed?" he asked, a good and timely question. They didn't seem to be, and were, in fact, waving a white rag tied to a bamboo pole, so we drove closer. We reached them and stopped, and they advanced nervously, holding the white before them as we got out of the car. We told them we weren't soldiers and didn't want to take them prisoner, but they begged to be brought in. They had walked six kilometers from their trenches, where they had buried their weapons, and they were cold. They were unshaven and dirty, dressed only in thin, light clothing, and had the desperate look people get after going even a little time without food. We gave them water and bread and chocolate and cheese and salami, and some of the cartons of orange drink, and we left them there. We really didn't want to take them. We weren't sure what we would do with them, and anyway we were going in the wrong direction, deeper into Kuwait. But a few miles on, we came to a huge, uncleared mine field blocking the highway and it was getting dark, and we were tired and jumpy, so we turned around.

We found the men only a bit past where we had left them, still trudging along, holding the bamboo pole before them, still with no one else in sight. All ten managed to cram into the little car, with one in the front seat between the two of us, four in the back, three fitted around the jerricans and two on the rear bumper.

We were wardens for only a few miles. We gave the men over to the first Allied troops we came to, a supply column of the Saudi Army's Fourth Tank Brigade. The Saudi soldiers, who had not, I think, seen any action in the war so far, got overexcited and started running around and yelling, slamming clips of ammunition into their rifles and generally carrying on, as they lined up the Iraqis in the sand on their knees. They terrified the prisoners, who began crying and begging for their lives and so on. One clutched his Koran to his chest for protection, and rocked, moaning, back and forth on his haunches. He was so sure he was going to die, it was hard to disagree with him. But the Saudi troops didn't mean any particular harm, and eventually they calmed themselves and the Iraqis gave the prisoners some more food and drink and cigarettes. The lieutenant who took charge of the operation was maybe 27 years old. When we drove away, he was walking self-importantly up and down in front of his prisoners, his beardless face beaming with the triumph of bloodless victory.

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Driving into Kuwait City on the twenty-seventh, the day after the first Kuwaiti troops entered the city the Iraqis had fled the night before, we didn't make it a mile before the crowds of shouting, shooting people stopped us. One of the first denizens we met was a middle-aged newspaper reporter named Abdullah Al Khateeb. This was his opening line: "The Iraqis killed the son of my aunt." He took us around the city, showing us what mattered most to him, one man's horror tour. First we went to a patch of dirt. It was just off the sidewalk, by a traffic circle, and across the street from one of the buildings where Iraqi security forces had interrogated people. He pointed to a big, fresh, russet bloodstain and a bloody keffiyeh. "Here," he said, "is where the Iraqis stood. They only shot the boys here, one with a pistol in the forehead, and one with a pistol in the back of the head. The boys died here."

Next we went to a police station that the Iraqis had converted into one of many makeshift prisons. The vileness of it was overwhelming. Among Arabs, the Iraqis have always had a reputation as being a hard and sometimes cruel people, but not necessarily savages. In Kuwait City, they lived as savages, in conditions of sickening wretchedness that they created for their victims and, incredible, themselves. The guards' living quarters in the prison were typical; garbage and rotting food ankle-deep; every piece of furniture broken or damaged; every file cabinet and desk spilled out onto the floor; deep, black grime caked onto the tile floors; and—most astonishing and most typical—piles of shit everywhere. (The Iraqis shat up their living quarters everywhere they went. Kuwaitis are fastidious even by the standards of the rich, and they s imply could not believe this; for weeks after the liberation they were still discussing it in tones of wonderment.) We walked through the prison, holding our hands to our faces against the smell. We looked at the small, dark room where guards had hooked up the prisoners to electric current and at the room in which 200 prisoners had been crowded at one time, sleeping on the tile floor with pieces of plastic foam for pillows. In one hallway we met an old man pushing along a wheelbarrow that contained a big sack of rice. "When the Iraqis were here, they take a bag of rice from me," he said, grinning. "Today, I come and take my rice back."

There was a sense of wonder to the first week, a sense that you were part of something the likes of which you would never see again. Americans in that first week couldn't pay for anything, couldn't move without finding friends. Reporters were taken to private homes, were given dinners and lunches and gifts of candy and cookies. Pretty girls on the street came up and thanked you for being an American. Every afternoon and every evening the city turned into a giant block party, with a great parade of honking cars and cheering people centered on Arabian Gulf Street, around the American embassy. One afternoon, I tried to walk through one of the celebrations and talk to people. I ended up signing autographs. Teenage girls with autograph books were working the crowd as if at a concert, pouncing on reporters and soldiers as if they were rock stars. Four girls had decorated their sweaters with small photographs of George Bush, John Major and Margaret Thatcher, each framed in little red, gold and silver spangles. I signed three autographs, and found out I was no better at thinking of clever things to write than I had been at signing high-school yearbooks. I wrote "To Maha, on a wonderful day, 3-1-91" and "congratulations and best wished to a brave Kuwaiti."

There was as well a sense of life without rules, a post-apocalyptic edge to things that was exciting and contagious. The great, soaring oil-well fires turned the sky dark at midday, and the young men with rifles—suddenly, every young man had a rifle, and everyone had been a hero in the resistance—spent the afternoons promenading along the Gulf and shooting at the sky. Their spent shells carpeted the road near the American embassy, the locus of celebration, and made sounds like metal popcorn when you drove over them. Reporters camped out at the Kuwait International Hotel, in rooms with no lights or phone or water, and wandered around the city seeing amazing things and hearing amazing stories wherever they turned. One afternoon I went to the home of one of Kuwait's richest families. We sat in the garden drinking tea. The garden was full of holes, and as we sat, a servant was busy digging a new one. During the early weeks of the Iraqi occupation, my host and his sons had taken their money and divided it into neat piles and wrapped the piles in heat-shrunk plastic and then in paper, put them in vacuum-sealed bags and buried the bags in the garden. Every night for weeks they buried 50,000 dinars, and pretty soon the garden was full of money. All told, they buried 520,000 Kuwaiti dinars and 900,000 Iraqi dinars (more than $2 million total), and they had carefully recorded the contents and location of each bag on a Macintosh computer. But somehow, they had misplaced one bag of 25,000 dinars—about $84,000—and no one had a clue where it was. "But it will turn up, I am sure," said the rich man cheerfully. "Things are turning up every day. Yesterday morning I was having breakfast and one of my Indian store managers handed me a bag and said he had found it in the dining-room clock. I opened it up and it had 25,000 dinars in it. I had forgotten all about that one."

But rules always return. The Kuwaiti government returned and set up shop. It hired a group of Washington flacks and—before taking care of food, water, electricity or medicine—set about to restore the bureaucracy. The flacks set up shop in the lobby of the Kuwait International, which soon began to sprout "media advisories." My favorite was "If tortured families are desired, please contact the Kuwaiti Press Information Office." The hotel began charging for the rooms, the soldiers at checkpoints began trying to enforce the curfew, and—a catharsis is by nature evanescent—the people began to behave normally again. By the second week, they no longer ran up to you on the street to tell you their stories or to hug you.

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I left then, but before I did, I took one last drive, up another road to Iraq. The road to Umm Qasr had been a secondary escape route for the Iraqi troops in their armed flight from Kuwait City on the night of February 26 and 27. American warplanes had bombed and strafed the road to stop the convoy, and had succeeded. Ten days after the cessation of hostilities, the road, somehow forgotten by clean-up crews, offered a series of fire-frozen tableaux of the way of modern war: a pack of white and yellow curs snarling and swarming around the skeleton of a man, his ribs gleaming whitely and his legs, eaten from inside out, collapsed in folds like hairy blankets with feet attached; hawks wheeling over another body, its face darkly yellow-green, except where the plucked eye sockets glistened wet and red; a butterflied man, his torso flayed wide by the bomb and his innards still coiled neatly in place but cooked to charcoal.

I counted thirty-seven corpses that day, some incinerated into mummified carbon men, some exploded into torn and ragged component parts, some mostly intact but bloated into great black-and-green balloons. I remember two scenes most clearly. One is of a flatbed truck, hit by cluster bombs and roasted by secondary explosions. Death had come so suddenly and with such force that the nine soldiers in the truck, stripped by the blast of their clothes and many of their parts, had been cooked and fid in their positions at the moment of impact. One cherub-faced boy, whose legs ended in fluttery shards of black at mid-thigh, seemed to be trying to burrow his way through the truck bed. His rear was high in the air, his hands, frozen into claws, dug into the wood. The other picture is of a soldier in his thirties. He had run from his truck and actually made it thirty yards into the desert before an explosion caught him. He too had been stripped nude, but he had not been cut to shreds or incinerated. He lay on his back, on a gentle hummock of sand, caught in the unlikely pose of a man resting after spirited and satisfying sex. One arm was flung wide, the palm of the hand up and relad. The other lay draped across his chest, with the hand resting just below his left breast. A fine layer of sand covered him. The wind blew as I looked at him, and it gently stirred the curly hair on his head and rustled the tufted thatch of his pubis, in a last, false sign of life.

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